My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 302 Sending

The night grew deeper.

In this upscale apartment on the outskirts of Boston, only three sounds remain.

The steady sound of the central air conditioning vents, the sound of Sam typing on his keyboard, and the sound of Chen Zhuo's Montblanc pen gliding across the paper.

On the coffee table, the all-English contract that would determine the future dominance of the computing power base worth tens of billions had been locked away in a drawer far away by David.

David himself leaned against a high stool next to the bar, dozing off with his eyes closed, one earphone still hanging around his neck.

Chen Zhuo sat in the chair, and every discrete symbol and every matrix arrangement was clearly written on the notebook.

There was no draft paper, nor any pause for reflection.

After finishing a page, Chen Zhuo pinched the bottom right corner of the paper with his left hand, gently turned it over, pressed his fingers along the seam of the page to flatten the surface, and then wrote the next page.

The rustling sound continued, like a fine autumn rain falling in a quiet room.

At the door of the study, Sam suddenly stopped typing.

He stared at the screen for a while, his brows furrowing more and more, until finally, in frustration, he raised his hand and ran his fingers through his messy curly hair.

Damn it.

Sam cursed under his breath and slammed the backspace key down on the keyboard.

The dozen or so lines of code on the screen were instantly cleared.

Sam let out a long breath, leaned back, and slumped into his chair. He turned his head and looked at Chen Zhuo sitting at the table across the hall.

Chen Zhuo lowered his head slightly, the warm yellow light of the desk lamp shining on his profile. He had just turned to a new page, and his pen continued to flow lines of symbols onto the paper without any pause.

Sam watched for a while, then couldn't help but lower his voice and call out to Allen, who was sitting on the carpet.

"Alan".

Allen was biting the plastic cap of a ballpoint pen, drawing a topological diagram of a physics model on an A4 sheet of paper. Hearing the sound, he took the pen out of his mouth and looked up.

"What are you doing?"

Alan's voice was also very soft, afraid of disturbing Chen Zhuo.

Sam pointed in Chen Zhuo's direction and said in a low voice.

"Look at him, what page is he on?"

Allen turned his head and squinted at the thickness of the papers that Chen Zhuo was flipping over.

"Twelve pages, or thirteen pages."

Allen looked away and answered softly.

Sam rubbed his sore eyes and sighed.

"Since I sat down, I've written 300 lines of code and deleted 250 lines."

Sam looked at his screen.

"That discrete boundary condition is completely incompatible with continuous states. Whenever I call a regular library, the system prompts an overflow."

Allen changed his posture and straightened his legs.

"Don't use the regular library," Allen said.

"Just apply the folded matrix he wrote in the tavern."

"I know I need to wear a mask."

Sam muttered to himself.

"But that requires a massive transformation of the underlying logic. My brain was practically fried, and look at him in the end."

Sam then pointed at Chen Zhuo.

"He didn't even have a single piece of draft paper."

Sam's tone conveyed a deep sense of frustration and disbelief.

"How did he manage to write such a massive pure algebraic derivation and quotient space mapping without stopping? Didn't he have the calculation process in his head? I feel like he wasn't deriving at all; it was like he was just copying from a pre-printed book."

The hall was quiet, and although Sam's voice was very low, it still reached Chen Zhuo.

Chen Zhuo paused for a moment, his pen still in his hand.

He paused, put down his pen, turned his head, and looked at Sam standing at the study door.

"Is it stuck?"

Chen Zhuo looked at Sam and asked softly.

Sam paused for a moment, then awkwardly touched his nose.

"The area where the boundaries converge is a bit tricky."

Sam told the truth.

"I'm trying to figure out a way to get around it."

Chen Zhuo gently capped the pen, stood up, pulled out a chair, and walked towards Sam.

Chen Zhuo walked to Sam's computer, rested one hand on the edge of the table, and stared at the flashing code on the screen.

After watching for a while, Chen Zhuo stretched out his finger and gently tapped a line on the screen.

"here."

Chen Zhuo's voice was calm.

"Don't bypass it. Just cut off the variable in this line and force it to be zero."

Sam was stunned.

"Cut it down?"

Sam's eyes widened.

"This is a core metric condition; if we remove it, the entire loop will break."

"It will break in continuous geometry."

Chen Zhuo looked at him with a slight smile on his lips.

"But in the discrete state, it not only doesn't break, but it also forms a new closed loop on its own. Try it."

Sam sat up straight with some skepticism, placed his fingers on the keyboard, and, following Chen Zhuo's instructions, directly deleted the two lines of complex boundary measure code and added a forced zeroing operator after them.

Press the Enter key.

The cursor on the screen blinked twice, and the compiler, which had been displaying red error messages, suddenly displayed a row of green success messages smoothly.

The data processing is successful.

Sam stared at the screen with his mouth agape, unable to utter a word for a long time.

Allen leaned over from the carpet, glanced at the screen, and then fell silent.

Chen Zhuo didn't say much. He straightened up and picked up the unopened bottle of mineral water on Sam's table.

"I'll get a bottle of water."

Chen Zhuochong shook the bottled water in his hand.

"Take it, take it."

Sam snapped out of his daze and nodded repeatedly.

"Chen, you're a monster."

Chen Zhuo smiled but didn't reply. He unscrewed the bottle cap, tilted his head back, and took a small sip.

He took the water bottle back to his seat, pulled out a chair and sat down again, removed the pen cap, and the pen tip fell onto the paper once more.

Sam watched Chen Zhuo's retreating figure, then turned and exchanged a glance with Allen.

Neither of them said anything. They lowered their heads and resumed their work, but this time, Sam typed much faster.

The Boston night slips away little by little amidst the rhythmic sounds.

At the same time in Cambridge, in a laboratory building at MIT, a room on the third floor was still lit.

The corridor was quiet, except for the vending machines whose lights were still on.

The room was somewhat cluttered, with dusty professional books piled on the shelves against the wall, and two monitors on a large desk.

Daniel stood by the table, holding a black landline microphone. He was wearing a wrinkled plaid shirt, and his hair looked greasy from staying up all night.

"Yes, it still can't be restarted."

Daniel spoke into the microphone, his voice tinged with anxiety.

"The IT department said the array disks were physically burned out? How is that possible? We were just running a truncation model with a dozen or so lines of operators!"

Daniel listened to the voice on the other end of the phone and irritably ruffled his hair.

"Okay, I got it. I'll change the hard drive tomorrow morning."

He slammed the microphone down onto the landline.

In the center of the room, there is a huge blackboard that takes up an entire wall.

An elderly man with gray hair was standing in front of the blackboard. He was wearing a slightly faded shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and he was holding half a piece of white chalk in his hand.

This is Professor Richard from the Department of Applied Mathematics at MIT.

The blackboard was covered with dense white formulas, and the derivation processes of various continuous topological manifolds were spread out on it like a spider web.

Professor Richard frowned, his eyes fixed on the monitor on his desk.

An image is displayed in the center of the monitor screen.

It was a very blurry photo.

The image has extremely low resolution, lots of noise, and even a slightly greenish tint. It's clearly a photo taken secretly in very low light conditions using a Nokia phone with a camera.

The background of the photo appears to be a cracked table, and along the edge of the crack in the wooden table, several lines of clean, even somewhat crude, algebraic symbols are written in half a piece of chalk.

These few lines of incomplete symbols burned out three RAID disks on their lab server just a few hours ago.

Professor Richard turned his head and looked at the derivation on the blackboard.

He raised the half-stamped piece of chalk in his hand, attempting to piece together the incomplete lines of discrete operators within the framework of continuous geometry.

Richard stopped after writing half a line. He shook his head, picked up the blackboard eraser next to him, and forcefully erased the half-line he had just written.

He changed his approach and picked up his pen again.

I wrote three symbols.

It stopped again.

Professor Richard's breathing became heavy. He took two steps back, unconsciously tightening the chalk between his fingers.

He snapped the piece of chalk in half, and a small piece of white chalk fell onto the wooden floor and rolled to the corner of the table.

Daniel hung up the phone and turned to look at Richard.

"professor."

Daniel walked over.

"If all else fails, we can contact Harvard tomorrow morning. Since that photo came from the Rusty Bar, there must be Harvard students who were there at the time who know the full version."

Richard did not look at Daniel.

He stared at the intricate, continuous differential manifolds on the blackboard, then glanced at the blurry mosaic photo on the monitor.

"No need to answer."

Richard's voice was a little hoarse.

He walked to the table, casually tossed the remaining chalk stubs onto the surface, picked up a slightly blackened rag, and slowly wiped the chalk dust off his fingers.

"It can't be connected."

Richard looked at the screen.

"The ironclad rules of continuous geometry are directly truncated here; this is not an optimization algorithm in a continuous state at all."

Daniel paused for a moment.

"Not optimization? Then what is it?"

Richard threw down the rag, pulled out the somewhat old swivel chair, and slowly sat down.

The old man stared at the few faintly visible discrete truncation operators in the quotient space on the screen for a long time, and his expression gradually changed.

There was no shock to the point of jumping up, nor any exaggerated shouting.

A deep sense of powerlessness slowly welled up in Richard's eyes.

He's all too familiar with this style.

This style is cold and devoid of any superfluous embellishment, utterly irrational in its use of discrete matrices to brutally dissect the original geometric system.

In the entire world of mathematics, you can count on two hands the number of people who can write the underlying constant wall in this style.

Only one operator can use the operator so cleanly and decisively to cut off a continuous manifold in one stroke.

Richard had seen the original copy of the article that caused a sensation in the academic world regarding the scratching part of the Hodge conjecture at a seminar a few months ago.

That's the style.

Richard leaned back in his chair and turned to look at Daniel.

Where is Professor Pierre's team now?

Richard asked softly.

Daniel was a little confused by the question, but he answered honestly anyway.

"At Harvard, these two days are the Poincaré Conjecture conference, and almost everyone in the world who works on geometry is in Boston."

Richard nodded.

"Did anyone see where Sam from Massachusetts and Allen from Princeton went last night?"

"I heard they went to Rusty for drinks."

Daniel thought about it.

"That photo also came out from the rusty area late last night. Someone said they saw a few of them putting together a table."

The clues had completely dried up in Richard's mind.

The styles match.

The people matched up.

The time and place fit together perfectly.

Richard reached out and picked up the mug on the table. The black coffee inside had long since gone cold, and a thin layer of oil had even floated on the surface.

He brought it to his lips and took a big gulp.

The bitter cold coffee flowed down his throat, making him feel much more awake.

Richard put the cup back on the table, looked at the theory he had studied for most of his life on the blackboard, shook his head helplessly, and gave a tired, bitter smile.

"professor?"

Daniel was somewhat bewildered by his reaction.

"Do you know who's writing the formula in the photo?"

Richard sighed, his gaze still fixed on the blackboard.

"A few months ago, he dismantled the scratching part that Hodge had guessed."

Richard's voice was very soft, as if he were talking to himself.

"Back then, we knew that his unreasonable behavior would eventually spread outwards and affect other areas as well."

Richard turned his head and looked at the monitor.

"We were all waiting for him to shine at a pure mathematics conference, but instead..."

Richard shook his head with a wry smile.

"This kid didn't even say hello. He went to a bar in the middle of the night for a drink and casually poached the students from computer science and physics."

Daniel stood there, his mouth slightly open, when a name that had been making headlines in academic circles recently suddenly flashed through his mind.

"You mean... that fourteen-year-old who came to Boston with Professor Pierre..."

Richard did not answer.

He stood up, walked to the door, and reached out to press the switch on the wall.

The incandescent lights on the office ceiling went out, leaving only the light from the screen.

"Go back to sleep, Daniel."

Richard's voice echoed down the corridor.

As the old professor at MIT sighed in the darkness, the sky over Boston was already quietly changing.

The once thick, inky darkness began to recede, and a faint glimmer of light appeared at the edge of the horizon.

Early autumn mornings always come very early.

In that upscale apartment in the suburbs.

Chen Zhuo drew a final, short horizontal line across the notebook with his Montblanc fountain pen.

A perfect discrete constant closed loop.

The pen tip stopped.

Chen Zhuo didn't move immediately; he quietly read through the derivation process on the last page.

From top to bottom, every line of the formula fits perfectly, without any logical loopholes or redundancy in any continuous state.

He raised his hand and put the black pen cap on the nib.

The hall was quiet.

The study door was ajar, and Sam had fallen asleep sometime earlier.

His 200-pound body lay sprawled on the large computer desk, his face pressed against several scraps of paper, a little drool even dribbling from his mouth, emitting even snores.

The code on the computer screen was still flashing line by line.

Allen lay on the carpet by the French windows, a coat casually covering him, and clutching the worn-out ballpoint pen in his hand.

Beside the bar, David kept his arms crossed over his chest, nodding off.

Chen Zhuo stood up.

Sitting for a long time caused a noticeable soreness in his right knee. Instead of moving around immediately, he stood next to the chair and gently massaged around his kneecap through his pants for a while.

He only started walking after the tingling and numb sensation subsided a little.

Chen Zhuo did not wake anyone.

He walked to a small table in the corner of the hall, where a Panasonic fax machine was placed.

Chen Zhuo opened the notebook in his hand and carefully tore out the fifteen pages filled with derivations.

He straightened the edges of the papers on the table.

Fifteen pages, quite thick when held in the hand.

Chen Zhuo put the paper into the fax machine's paper feed slot. The machine sensed the paper, made a soft click, and picked up the first page.

He stretched out his finger and skillfully pressed a long string of numbers on the fax machine's keypad.

The dedicated line to Dean Cyril's office.

Press the send button.

The fax machine's speaker immediately emitted a dial tone.

The sound was somewhat jarring in the hall. David frowned in his sleep, then shifted his position and continued sleeping.

A few seconds later, the call was connected.

A sharp, electronic handshake sound came from the machine—the unique sound of online interaction from that era.

The fax machine's motor started spinning, making a creaking sound.

The first page was slowly rolled in.

Then comes the second page, and the third page.

Chen Zhuo put his hands in his pockets, stood next to the fax machine, and quietly watched the papers filled with mathematical symbols fly one by one along the telephone line to Princeton, hundreds of kilometers away.

The fax machine operates very slowly.

By the time all fifteen pages of paper had been passed around and spat into the tray below, the sky outside had already brightened considerably.

Chen Zhuo put the draft away and set it aside.

He turned around and walked towards the floor-to-ceiling window.

Outside the window, the early autumn morning mist in Boston had not yet completely dissipated, and the Charles River in the distance shimmered with a cool light under the morning sun.

A few early birds landed on the red oak tree outside the window, shaking their dew-covered feathers.